This invention relates to a grass cutting device, in particular to a form of lawn mower for automatic and unattended operation.
Lawn mowers are widely used for the maintenance of lawns, mainly at residential homes, but also in commercial environments. Mowers were originally manually operated, relying on the user to push them along. Nowadays, the cutters are commonly powered by electrical or petrol engines, but the user must still exert a considerable force to push the mower forwards. The majority of mowers nonetheless still rely on a user to guide and operate them. This makes lawn mowing a moderately arduous and time-consuming task. For larger lawns, powered mowers may take the form of small vehicles on which the user sits. Such vehicles are expensive and only suitable for large-scale applications.
Automated mowers have been proposed in the past which are suitable for unattended operation. These may follow a pre-programmed path or may be mechanically guided, e.g. along rails buried in the lawn. Such devices are very limited in application, particularly since they are in effect dedicated to a single lawn.
There has now been devised an improved form of grass cutting device which overcomes or substantially mitigates the above-mentioned disadvantages.